The popular social networking site Facebook is not doing enough to protect the personal information it gets from subscribers, and it gives users confusing and incomplete information about privacy matters, Canada's privacy commissioner said on Thursday.

"It's clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates," Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a report on an investigation into Facebook.

Seth Owusu knew at a young age that he wanted to help his countrymen. "I came from Ghana," Owusu recalls. "It all started when I was in primary school and we had some missionaries come to the school."

Just after he graduated from a technical college, Owusu established Entire Village Computer Organization, a small nonprofit organization that donates refurbished used computers to schools. EVCO goes much further than simply dropping off the computers in villages.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the number of people using the online social networking service has climbed to 250 million.

Palo Alto, California-based Facebook was founded in 2004 and has become the most popular online social networking service, eclipsing News Corporation-owned MySpace.

"The rapid pace of our growth is humbling and exciting for us," Zuckerberg said in a message posted at Facebook's official blog. "For us, growing to 250 million users isn't just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made."

The U.K. was the likely source of a series of attacks last week that took down popular Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, according to an analysis performed by a Vietnamese computer security analyst. The address is registered to Global Digital Broadcast in the U.K. "Having located the attacking source in U.K., we believed that it is completely possible to find out the hacker," Nguyen wrote.

The results contradict assertions made by some in the U.S. and South Korean governments that North Korea was behind the attack. Security analysts had been skeptical of the claims, which were reportedly made in off-the-record briefings and for which proof was never delivered.

The microblogging service Twitter is taking legal advice after hundreds of documents were hacked into and published by a number of blogs.

"We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker and anyone who accepts...or publishes these stolen documents, " said Twitter's Biz Stone. In a blog posting he wrote that "About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked.

As such, Facebook is quickly becoming a hotbed of activity for all kinds of malware and financial scams. With 200 million registered users, Facebook represents an ocean of fish which are all accessible in one convenient place. It helps that many Facebook users are relatively unsophisticated at the web and especially the complex security issues surrounding it, and are thus more susceptible to attacks delivered via the social network.

Facebook says it's doing its part to fight the problem, but it can't monitor every bit that passes through its servers. Less than 1 percent of its users have been victimized over the last five years, it says. That sounds good, until you realize that could be up to 2 million people, hardly a drop in the bucket.

A British hacker who has been fighting extradition to the United States for seven years today made an eleventh-hour appeal to a British court to be tried in the U.K. instead of in a U.S. federal court.

Gary McKinnon, 43, has admitted that in 2001 he broke into U.S. Department of Defense, NASA and U.S. Army computer systems. However, McKinnon has been using a series of legal maneuvers and appeals to fight extradition to the U.S. since he was indicted in November 2002 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on charges related to the computer hacks.

Microsoft Corp warned that cybercriminals have attacked users of its Office software for Windows PCs, exploiting a programing flaw that the software giant has yet to repair. The world's largest software maker issued the warning on Tuesday as it released patches to address nine other security holes in its software.

Cybercriminals target Microsoft programs because they are so widely used, allowing them to go after the largest number of potential victims with one set of code. (Windows runs more than 90 percent of the world's PCs. Office has some 500 million users).

The number of botnets and of computers controlled by them in China has fallen in recent years, though the country remains a top host for the networks of compromised computers, according to the government and independent researchers.

Over 1.2 million computers in China were newly infected with software that enabled their control by a botnet last year, about one-third the figure for the previous year, according to a report published late last month by China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT). That followed an equally steep fall from 2006, when the team estimated there were 10 million new infections in China.

The police are to examine claims that a huge mobile phone hacking operation was launched by the News of the World, targeting thousands of people. The Guardian says the Sunday paper's reporters paid private investigators to hack into phones, many of them owned by politicians and celebrities. It is alleged details were suppressed by the police and the High Court.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "This raises questions that are serious and will obviously have to be answered." Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has ordered a senior officer to "establish the facts".

The defendant in the case of a MySpace hoax that ended in a girl's suicide applauded a federal judge for tentatively dismissing her conviction that could have resulted in up to three years in prison.

Prosecutors had argued that Drew and an accomplice, who was granted immunity, pretended to be a teenage boy named Josh, and used that identity to at first flirt with 13-year-old Megan Meier, an emotionally troubled classmate of Drew's daughter, before turning on her.

South Korean police said they have arrested a hacker for staging cyber attacks similar to those that crippled domestic and US websites this week.

The 39-year-old identified only as Choi is accused of paralysing the homepage of the government Game Rating Board by using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) method.

Choi was an agent for software developers seeking approval from the board for new games. Because he failed to finish one job on time, he crashed the site to create an excuse for his tardiness. Choi is accused of buying a hacking programme from an ethnic Korean in China.

Computer security experts were divided Thursday on whether North Korea was behind the ongoing attacks on US and South Korean websites, an assault that highlighted the vulnerabilities of the Web.

The so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack used an army of malware-infected computers known as a "botnet" in a bid to paralyze US and South Korean websites by overwhelming them with traffic.

Around a dozen websites in the United States, including those of the White House, State Department and Pentagon, and another dozen in South Korea were among those targeted in the attack which began on Sunday.

New York's attorney general charged Thursday that Tagged.com stole the identities of more than 60 million Internet users worldwide — by sending e-mails that raided their private accounts. Andrew Cuomo said he plans to sue the social networking Web site for deceptive marketing and invasion of privacy.

"This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people," Cuomo said in a statement. "Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged's unethical — and illegal — behavior."

A denial of service attack that took down some of South Korea's highest profile Web sites on Wednesday is set to resume Thursday evening, according to computer security specialist AhnLab. The attack will restart at 6pm local time (9am GMT) and be directed at a smaller number of sites that those hit a day earlier. They will include government Web sites and the home pages of the Chosun Ilbo newspaper and Kookmin Bank.

A denial of service attack involves sending a massive volume of traffic to a Web site so that it becomes overloaded. While some users will occasionally be able to access the site being attacked most will see nothing until a network time-out message appears.

A botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against U.S. government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the U.S. and South Korea.

The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) Web site offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government Web sites have also been targeted, including the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

A Long Island, New York, social worker is facing two misdemeanor charges after allegedly posting a sexually suggestive ad on Craigslist that gave interested parties the home phone number of a 9-year-old girl.

Officials told CNN affiliate News 12 in Long Island that the Craigslist ad read "I need a little affection... I'm blond, I'm cute and I'll be waiting." Interested parties were directed to an e-mail address where they were given the girl's name and home phone number. Callers were unaware they were trying to reach a 9-year-old.

A series of cyber-attacks that targeted and paralyzed government networks and leading portal servers Tuesday and Wednesday are raising concerns that the world's self-proclaimed Internet powerhouse is prone to hacking and other cyber security threats.

The prosecution and police launched an investigation Wednesday to track the origin of hackers who hijacked a dozen local Internet sites, including those run by Cheong Wa Dae, the National Assembly, the Ministry of National Defense and top Web portal Naver, from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning.

A U.S. district court has ordered key players in an international spam ring to give up $3.7 million that they made by sending out illegal e-mail messages pitching bogus hoodia weight-loss products and a “human growth hormone” pill they claimed reversed the aging process.

In a Federal Trade Commission law enforcement action, the court found that the five defendants, located in Canada and St. Kitts, violated the FTC Act and the CAN-SPAM Act by participating in the spam operation. The court order bars the defendants from violating the CAN-SPAM Act and from making false or unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of any food, drug, or dietary supplement.

The Obama administration is moving cautiously on a new pilot program that would both detect and stop cyber attacks against government computers, while trying to ensure citizen privacy protections.

Any involvement of the NSA - the agency oversees electronic intelligence-gathering - in protecting domestic computer networks worries privacy and civil liberties groups who oppose giving such control to U.S. spy agencies.

One of Britain's biggest online paedophile inquiries is to be challenged in the court of appeal amid allegations from campaigners that hundreds of men have been wrongly convicted in a mass miscarriage of justice.

Senior officers in Ceop, the child exploitation and online protection unit, who co-ordinated the inquiry, have been anticipating the test case for some time. They are adamant that Ore was an extremely successful operation, which led to more than 2,600 British men who downloaded images of child abuse, or attempted to, being brought to justice. The vast majority of them pleaded guilty.

Lori Drew, 50, pretended to be a boy on the MySpace website to befriend Megan Meier, who hanged herself after the virtual friendship ended. Sentencing will take place this week in the first federal cyber bullying case in the US which was brought to trial after a teenage girl took her own life.

The US National Crime Prevention Council in a report last year found that 43% of teens are exposed to cyber bullying in one form or another yet only one in 10 kids told their parents. "Cyber bullying can have such a devastating effect on our young people from depression to falling grades and low self esteem. This case shows however that cyber bullying is not something that just young people commit but we as adults can also be at fault," said the council's Michelle Boykin.

The head of the U.S. Secret Service on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding with the head of the Italian police and the chief executive officer of the Italian Postal Service to set up an international task force to combat cyber crime.

"This is not a borderless crime and we believe there needs to be a reaction at an international level. We'll provide all our resources to make that happen," Mark Sullivan, the director of the U.S. Secret Service, said after signing the accord at a ceremony at the Italian interior ministry.

China has announced it would indefinitely postpone a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a controversial content-filtering application, state media reported.

A June 24 letter from the U.S. Department of Commerce to the Chinese government listed "numerous concerns raised by global technology companies, Chinese citizens, and the worldwide media about the stability of the software, the scope and extent of the filtering activities and its security weaknesses."

Despite such communication, there has been no indication so far from the Chinese government that the rule will be revoked, only delayed.

A blind Boston-area teenager was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday for hacking into the telephone network and harassing the Verizon investigator who was building a case against him.

Matthew Weigman, 19, was part of a group of telephone hackers that met up on telephone party lines and was associated with more than 60 "swatting" calls to 911 numbers across the country. Weigman, known as "Little Hacker," became involved in telephone hacking around age 14 and continued to operate until last year.

Within hours of the death of pop star Michael Jackson, spam trading on his demise hit in-boxes, a security firm said as it warned that more junk mail was in the offing. Just eight hours after news broke about Jackson, Abingdon, England-based Sophos PLC started tracking the first wave of Jackson spam, which used a subject line of "Confidential -- Michael Jackson."

The spam wasn't pitching a product or leading users to a phishing or malware Web site. Instead it was trying to dupe users into replying to the message in order to collect e-mail addresses and verify them as legitimate.

Police in western Switzerland have broken a paedophile online network operating in nearly 80 different countries, the official Swissinfo.ch news website reported Sunday.

At least 32 people across Switzerland are now under investigation due to suspected connections with the case, the website quoted police in the canton of Vaud as saying.

A police official said cybercrime experts in Lausanne were alerted by Interpol more than a year ago that pornographic details were hidden on a website for hip-hop music run by a webmaster in western Switzerland.

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